Hundreds of Kurds found buried in Iraq mass graves

US investigators preparing war crimes trials against Saddam Hussein and his deputies have uncovered the bodies of hundreds of Kurdish men, women and children in the first forensic exhumation of a mass grave in Iraq.

The grave site, in Hatra, near the ancient city of Nineveh, is thought to hold the bodies of several thousand Kurds in nine separate trenches. One, named Grave 002, holds the corpses of around 300 women and children.

"It is my personal opinion that this is a killing field. Someone used this field on significant occasions over time to take bodies up there, and to take people up there and execute them," said Greg Kehoe, a former US federal prosecutor who spent five years working on the war crimes tribunal in the Balkans and who is leading the excavation team.

"I've been doing grave sites for a long time, but I've never seen anything like this, women and children executed for no apparent reason," he said.

Hatra is the first of around 10 sites that are to be properly exhumed across Iraq one at a time as part of a $75m (about £42m) programme to draw up detailed forensic, photographic and written evidence of the regime's atrocities.

Elsewhere, the insurgency persisted yesterday, with six US troops killed in attacks. The Iraqi prime minister, Ayad Allawi, warned residents in Falluja to give up suspected militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and his supporters or face an onslaught.

The victims in Hatra have been identified as Kurds from the Lake Dokan area, near Suleimaniya. They were killed in late 1987 or early 1988, the time of the regime's Anfal campaign of repression against the Kurdish minority and a time when both Britain and the US still maintained close relations with Saddam's regime.

Exhumation at Hatra began six weeks ago. The site is in a dried river bed, hidden from the dirt tracks that run nearby. "It's a perfect place for executions," said Mr Kehoe.

Nine trenches were found, although only two have been excavated. The position of the bodies, contorted and wrapped around each other, has been carefully mapped, layer by layer.

In Grave 002, a narrow trench running downhill into the sand, investigators found some of the most harrowing scenes. One woman had died still holding in her arms her child, aged two. She was shot in the face, the child was shot in the back of the head.

Many appeared to have taken all their belongings with them. Women were found wearing several layers of clothing - in one case 11 separate layers - and carrying pots and pans.

Mr Kehoe showed a slide of a young boy's skeleton found next to a red-and-white striped plastic ball. "This is a young boy with a ball, still holding on to the ball when we uncovered him," he said.

In another case the investigators found a woman's clothes, her headscarf, five pairs of gold earrings, a pair of shoes, a coin, a tube of antibiotic cream, a matchbox, a small tin and some decomposed money.

The remains of several foetuses were found among the bodies, the youngest put at between 18 and 20 weeks. "Tiny bones, femurs, thighbones the size of a matchstick," said P Willey, a professor of anthropology from Cal ifornia State University who is in charge of the morgue set up in a tent near the site.

Only 123 bodies from the trench have been removed and examined in detail, enough to prepare the case.

The second trench, marked Ninawa 009, is much deeper and holds only the bodies of men. So far 64 have been exhumed.

"The men were tied together, blindfolded and shot and their clothes are all torn up. They are all multiple gunshot wounds," Mr Kehoe said. "They picked a very isolated spot. Literally there's no place to run."

All the men wore traditional Kurdish clothes, which have been ripped apart by the bullets from the AK-47 Kalash nikov assault rifles used in the killings. Nearly all were blindfolded and many had their hands tied with rope. Their bodies lie against one wall in the trench, suggesting they tried to run from the gunfire.

"We're going to present evidence that these people were systematically executed," said Mr Kehoe. "These are not battle wounds, make no mistake about it. This was an execution."

Investigators from Europe are not taking part in the excavations because of concerns about the Iraq special tri bunal's decision to use the death penalty in sentencing war crime convicts.

Dozens of grave sites were unearthed in an often chaotic manner immediately after the war last year by relatives of people who had disappeared.

At the time international human rights groups criticised the US military and occupation authorities for failing to oversee proper investigative exhumations. At least 300,000 Iraqis are believed to have been killed under Saddam's regime and at least 40 graves have so far been uncovered.

· An American photographer, Paul Taggart, 24, was released in Baghdad late on Tuesday two days after being kidnapped while working on a story about a Shia militia loyal to the cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.